The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince
by Jane Ridley
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
One of the most readable 'Bertie' biographies I've found.
Although the title suggests this may focus largely on his love life, this tasteful biography is something far from that. Even so, while he admired and deeply respected his publicly adored and stone-deaf queen consort, Alexandra, he did intimately liaise with over 50 other women, his most famous mistresses being actresses Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt, Lady Randolph Churchill mother of Winston Churchill and Alice ('Mrs') Keppel. These affairs are soundly documented by Jane Ridley, who never resorts to sensationalism.
Not an academically minded youth, he was prone to schoolroom tantrums, being such a fish out of water. His derisive, perpetually disappointed mother, Queen Victoria, wished he was more like his father, Prince Albert, for whom she famously mourned for much of her long reign. So determinedly did she keep Bertie out of her royal business that he had little but leisure to occupy himself with throughout his protracted princely years. He learnt statecraft from the wings, having it down pat by the time of his late succession.
It was a rapidly changing world over which Edward came to preside and he excelled in mediating between clashing expansionist powers, becoming nicknamed 'the Peacemaker'. Through his parents, his wife, his eight siblings' dynastic marriages and those of his six offspring, he was related to virtually every branch of European royalty.
His epoch is one which lingers in the collective living memory, with seniors still cherishing faded family pictures along with anecdotes verbally passed down through parents from grandparents and great grandparents - this was Queen Elizabeth II's great grandfather. His demise marked the end of an era though. Society would change abruptly, dramatically and irreversibly as WWI loomed.
A fine biography on an interesting king who got to the throne late in life yet whose decade there remains a distinct one.
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